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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Villaruel's Folly By Antonio C. Abaya November 12, 2003 Our blood pressure had not yet returned to normal at the height of the impeachment frazzle, and our hearts were still pounding from the anger we felt over the insolence of the Brat Pack, when we were once again pulled to our bad-news TV, this time in the wee hours of the morning, to witness yet again another sad installment in the unraveling of this unfortunate country. Panfilo Villaruel, former head of the Air Transportation Office, among other things, and Navy Lt. SG Ricardo Catchillar, both armed with guns, grenades and explosives, were shot to death by a SWAT team after the duo had taken control of the 12-storey high NAIA-2 control tower after midnight November 8.. Although public opinion has largely been favorable to the swift and decisive action of the government in dealing with the emergency, there is a contretemps from the usual suspects to the effect that it was an overkill, that the SWAT team used excessive force, that the human rights of the poor criminals (seizing government property is a crime, and so is endangering the lives of other people) had been violated, that they were in fact talking to media about surrendering when the SWAT team smashed down the tower door and riddled them with bullets. While the government in any other country would have done the same in a similar situation, we must remind ourselves, if we need to be reminded, that this is the Philippines, a Roman Catholic country that is really "protestant," where the inhabitants, including those who do not pay any taxes, protest with impunity against anything and everything�and this is election year (which gives a political color to those protests.) Would another president have ordered a softer approach to the situation? Certainly not a President Danding (or his possible dummy, President FPJ), not a President Gringo, not a President Ping, all of whom are no-nonsense macho men, not the type who would brook any challenge to their authority. Would a President Roco, an Honorary Woman, perhaps, favor a softly-softly, motherly embrace for the two wayward boys? I don't know. Roco hasn't said anything about it, although his silence would seem to suggest that he has no quarrel with GMA over it. The only groups who have made a big fuss over it are GMA's most strident critics, the elitist Council of Pipitsugin Affairs (vide a tearful Triccie Sison embracing one of the widows), their faux-proletarian communist allies (led by Teddy Casino of Bayan and Argee Guevara of Sanlakas), plus some creatures they had dredged up from the swamp, who all made the predictable 'protestant' scene somewhere in Makati. Would a President Joma have treated Villaruel and Catchilliar with kid gloves? Very unlikely. In June 1989, when the People's Liberation Army's APCs plowed through tens of thousands of student demonstrators on Tienanmen Square in Beijing with machine-guns blazing, Joma Sison (and Crispin Beltran of the KMU) were two of the few, worldwide, who applauded the massacre. Comrades Teddy and Argee, take note. While we commiserate with the families of the two, there is no sympathy here for the action that they had willfully and with malice aforethought taken. Were they acting alone? It looks like it, though one must wonder what anyone could possibly hope to accomplish holed up in a tower in almost total physical isolation. Were they drunk or high on drugs? It did not look like they were. So why did they do what they did? According to print and broadcast media, Villaruel was in despair over widespread corruption in government. "Like you, I've been airing complaints against the government. But did anyone listen?�..All we do is debate, all we do is argue�.This is my last contribution, my legacy to the decent people of the Philippines - to stand up and tell the leaders of this country to wake up�..I am the representative of 82 million Filipinos who are crying for help. I am ready to offer my life�." (Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 9.) Media also quoted Villaruel that they were just "airing their grievances." That is exactly how the Magdalo mutineers justified their spontaneous coming together at Oakwood, armed to the teeth with spontaneous high-powered rifles and spontaneous C-4 plastique explosives: they were just spontaneously airing their grievances about corruption. There are a thousand and one ways for malcontents to air their grievances without seizing public or private property and without endangering the lives of other people, and at the same time get the media to focus on their cause. They could, for example, emulate the Buddhist monks of South Vietnam in the 1960s by dousing themselves with gasoline and setting themselves on fire at, say, the corner of Ayala and Makati avenues during rush hour. They could also jump without parachutes from a helicopter hovering at 1,000 meters and fall splat on the concrete tarmac of the NAIA, in broad daylight so they could be witnessed by airport reporters. They could alternatively lie under the steel wheels of a slow-moving PNR locomotive at, say, the Buendia crossing where traffic is perpetually gridlocked, their brave manifestoes tucked in their shirt pockets. Or they could collectively slash their wrists in the lobby of ABS-CBN in Quezon City or the Inquirer offices in Makati, and bleed to death while being interviewed as media celebrities. Since the Magdalo mutineers and Villaruel-Catchillar vowed that they were ready to die for their cause, there should be no hesitation about dying horrible deaths since media will not pay much attention to them if they merely took an overdose of sleeping pills. According to former DOTC Secretary Josefina Lichauco, under whom Villaruel served as undersecretary during the Ramos presidency, Villaruel was "very patriotic" but was "in despair" because the government did not support his initiatives. He is said to have developed a small airplane made of wood, the Defiant 300, as well as a small helicopter that he called the Hummingbird, which the Ramos government apparently rejected or ignored. While a case can be made that Villaruel was a patriot, though a misguided and disturbed one, as an aviation person he did not know what he was talking about and, after rejection, was sulking over. Building a wooden plane in this day and age is like traveling to, say, Hong Kong in a balangay canoe or a hot air balloon. It does not add to the store of human knowledge and it makes you a danger to yourself and to others. One wooden airplane and one small helicopter do not an aviation industry make. Sulking over its rejection to the point of seizing the NAIA control tower years later merely compounds one act of folly with another. If Villaruel really wanted to know what it took to start an aviation industry, during his watch as chief of the grandiosely misnomered Philippine Aerospace Development Corp. in the 1980s, he should have visited the facilities of IPTN Nusantara in Bandung, Indonesia, set up by then State Minister for Research and Technology, B. J. Habibie.. Dr. Habibie earned his doctorate in aeronautical design, summa cum laude, at the Aachen Technische Hochschule in Germany. After graduation, he worked for the Messerschmitt company (producer of Germany's best WWII fighter plane, the Me-109, and the world's first operational jet fighter, the Me-262), rising to vice-president for research, with 80 German engineers under him. When I first met Dr. Habibie in 1988 (he invited me to Indonesia three other times since), his Nusantara plant was turning out helicopters under license from Bell Textron of the US, Kawasaki of Japan, Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm of Germany, and Dassault Aviation of France. Not merely assembling imported components, but actually machining those components in Bandung from raw aluminum slabs. Nusantara was also fabricating, under a joint venture with CASA of Spain, a 32-seater twin-engined transport plane in both military and civilian versions. Nusantara was also fabricating components for the Lockheed F-16 jet fighter, as well as for the Boeing 727 and 767 jetliners, and was negotiating a contract to make parts for Rolls Royce aircraft engines. In my last visit to Indonesia, in 1994, Nusantara actually rolled out, before 500 invited guests from all over the world, a fly-by-wire 65-passenger turbo-prop airliner, designed and built by Indonesians (except for the engines and the avionics), which Dr. Habibie hoped to sell in the lucrative North American market by assembling it in Alabama or someplace from components fabricated in Indonesia. Not one of Nusantara's aircraft, whether fixed-wing or rotary, was made of wood. Dr. Habibie himself told me that in the early 1970s, while he was still with Messerschmitt, his boss met President Marcos in a diplomatic function somewhere. The German CEO, who was under the impression that Indonesians and Filipinos were one and the same people, bragged to Marcos that "my vice-president for research is from your country." Whereupon Marcos asked the German to send his Filipino vp to Manila to help start the Philippines' aviation industry. Habibie narrated to me how he was met at the Manila airport by two colonels who proceeded to talk to him in Tagalog, and how Marcos himself talked to him in Tagalog when he was brought to Malacanang. (Dr. Habibie is fluent in Bahasa, German and English, but does not know more than a few words of Tagalog). I do not recall how many weeks or months Dr. Habibie stayed in Manila to study the plans for the Philippine Aerospace Development Corp., but what struck him most, Dr. Habibie told me, was the absence of any strategic plan to progressively graduate from assembling imported components to actually fabricating those components locally. Of course, Dr. Habibie did not give away to the Filipinos his plans, not only for locally fabricating components of foreign-designed aircraft, but eventually for designing and building completely new aircraft to compete in the global market, a plan that he was reserving for his beloved Indonesia. His opportunity came in 1975 when President Suharto (a family friend of the Habibies when Suharto was a colonel posted in their hometown of Pare-Pare in Sulawesi) asked him to come home from Germany to help in the industrialization of Indonesia. Aside from aircraft, Dr. Habibie's ministry also organized and oversaw the fabrication, under license from foreign patent-owners, of diesel engines, electric generators, telecom equipment, armaments, naval warships, merchant vessels, oil tankers, LNG bulk carriers, railway equipment, machine tools and computers; established a 1,000-hectare science and technology research center manned by 700 Indonesian PhDs and MSs in the physical sciences and engineering; and acquired a wind tunnel - the only one in a Third World country - to backstop Nusantara's aircraft ventures.. Dr. Habibie told me that what they had achieved in, at that time, 13 years, "you Filipinos can achieve in less time, because your human resources are superior to ours." He rattled off the foundation years of the University of the Philippines (1905) and the University of Santo Tomas (1611), institutions the likes of which the Dutch never built for the natives in the 211 years that they controlled the country. "What you Filipinos lack is good leadership." Amen.. Postscript. Dr. Habibie was appointed vice-president of Indonesia in the mid-1990s. And when Suharto was overthrown in 1998, he succeeded as president of the republic, a position which the politically naive technocrat held for only 17 months. In the elections of October 1999, Habibie, a devout Muslim himself, lost out to Abdulrahman Wahid, head of the country's largest Muslim organization. It was a symbolical turning point: Wahid was blind in one eye and was so physically weak he could not rise up from a chair or walk around without being propped up by an aide.. Without the vision of Habibie and without the financial muscle provided by Suharto, the Nusantara aircraft plant in Bandung, which employed thousands of engineers and technicians and was a source of national pride for Indonesians, was abandoned. ***** The bulk of this article appears in the November 22, 2003 issue of the Philippines Free Press magazine. |
| OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to "Villaruel's Folly" Exactly what it was that some self-branded, self-labelled, self-appointed civil libertarians-advocates and advocacies, and militant media do not understand about two guys terrorizing and threatening to wreak havoc, to create mayhem, and at the very least, to disturb the peace....being quieted down and eternally put out of business, for the peace and tranquility of the greater number, I just simply cannot comprehend, myself, Tony. For too long, already, the failed-slogarn "Forgive, Forget, Deny." (de colores, brad) has served no purpose than to encourage, synergize and perpetuate "impunity through amnesty." Indeed. Time to change and try something different. How about. "Convict. Execute. Demand." I heard the last few words of a would-be-wannabee-a-star-like-my-oakwood-groupies, "Surrender, Surrender na kami." I am not sure I understand what those words meant. I heard the voice. But I cannot discern any feeling or emotion from its utterance. Who did "kami" want to surrender? Moments before "kami want to take over and be in charge." The Golden Rule applies. He who has the gold, rules. You play. You pay. Why did this incident occur, barely 3 and 1/2 months before a similar act of rebellion, sedition and anarchy was staged in "Room Service, Please. We have a coup party to attend." Sign of the times? Restiveness? Maybe. May-bigote. I don't believe nor accept the reasons that the perpetrators themselves advance, or the sympathetic media and civil libertarians embellish. If all of our lives depended on our abilities and willingness to risk and sacrifice all - in pursuit of this REAL REASON, I think we will all sadly discover..."All for this...shit...? This isn't worth the used TP, I crapped on....come on....be real." I know one thing. If those "cotillon coup d'ettaters" were dealt with exactly the same way, these airport marauders were....I do believe these airport guys will still be alive.. (simply because, they would not have dared....) Now, let's have a few more of those incidents ending the same way, until we can all come "face-to-face" with ourselves and answer truthfully and factually, the question: "Gaano katapang ang nagtatapangtapangan...gaano katapang ang duwag?" Pepeton Janton, [email protected] November 14, 2003 ............................................................ Thanks. I completely agree with you. Felipe R. Diego, [email protected] November 14, 2003 ............................................................... Dear Tony: This piece was particularly perceptive. Bravo! Mon Mayuga, [email protected] Past President, Rotary Club of Makati Ayala November 14, 2003 ............................................................. A belated epitaph for Villaruel and future homicidal maniacs: "Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, To all the sensual world proclaim: One hour of glorious life, Is worth an age without a name." Sir Walter Scott Ross Tipon, [email protected] November 15, 2003 ............................................................. A fine but sad story, Tony. More power to you. Ding Roces, [email protected] November 16, 2003 ................................................................ Tony, thanks for sending this to me. Regards. Boots Geotina-Garcia, [email protected] November 17, 2003 ................................................................. An excellent commentary, Mr. Abaya. Thank you for writing it. Godspeed, Winda LPR, [email protected] November 14, 2003 ...................................................................... Tony, I get raves about your articles also, from my associates who I include in my regular distribution. Lately, I have noticed, however, that some...not all...but some COPA insiders have been against your views, even when it is obvious that you have the correct ones. Is it because they perceive you as their "political enemy"? I have addressed this issue with them who take the opposing view from yours. And have never been favored with something that I can sink my teeth in. Pepeton Janton, [email protected] November 14, 2003 MY REPLY.,The Communists hate me. Danding hates me. Erap hates me. Ping hates me. Gringo hates me. The Marcoses hate me. The media hate me. I must be doing something right! It is no surprise to me that some of your COPA friends also hate me.I have mentioned in my articles that Peping Cojuangco's and Boy Saycon's unhappiness with GMA stems from their not having been named to her Cabinet, as they had expected. I have also criticized COPA's playing footsie with the communists. And, in the case of Saycon, his participation in the demolition derby against GMA is fired by the need to promote his protege Loren at the expense of GMA since Loren's VP chances are in inverse proportion to GMA's re-election chances. Female-to-female is kinky sex but bad politics. No wonder Loren also hates me. ......................................................................... |
Just got back from Manila and Indonesia. Our visit to Manila is my wife's annual trip to visit her sisters and respective families.My mother is deceased but the rest of my sisters' families are in Virginia so I just went to meet with the '53 Ateneo college jubilarians of which I am a member. In Indonesia we visited Yogjakarta and saw the Pambranan and Borobodur sites and then proceeded to Bali for a night there. I am sorry I missed you when I phoned your home. I had a pleasant chat with your spouse Marica and shared our concern about our country and its leaders today. Keep on writing the qualtiy of prose you are writing, Tony. In years to come your name will be among the heroes of our country where it rightfully belongs. Tony Joaquin, [email protected] November 16, 2003 MY REPLY: What can I say, except �Wow!� OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |